shelf, and failing. Her connection with the spell brought her the feeling of the massive slab of stone dropping toward it, closer, closer still. Making contact— crushing down and down onto her wizardry with force more terrible than she had anticipated. The spell was failing, the shelf was settling down on it and inexorably pressing it closer and closer to Areinnye, who was in turn being forced down against the battering of the shock waves, toward the floor of the canyon. The spell was breaking up, tearing like a rotten net filled with weights. No, Nita thought, and strained, pouring all her concentration, all her will, down the connection to the spell. No! It was like hanging on to a rope in a tug of war, and losing, and not letting go — digging in, muscles popping out all over, aching, straining, blood pounding, and not letting go-The spell firmed a little. The shelf, settling slowly down and down onto Areinnye, forcing her closer and closer to the bottom, seemed to hesitate. “Kit!” Nita screamed into the water. I’m gonna lose it. I’m gonna lose it! Kit!”
The echo of her yell for help showed her another sperm-whale shape, a larger one than Areinnye’s, fighting his way against the battering shock waves and down toward the bottom of the canyon — toward where Areinnye floundered, underneath the stone shelf, underneath the spell. Kit rammed Areinnye head-on, hitting her squarely amidships and punching the smaller sperm whale backward thirty or forty feet. But not out from under the settling shelf; and now Kit was partly under it too. The spell began sagging again. Nita panicked; she had no time or energy left for any more warnings, any more anything. She threw herself so totally into the spell that she couldn’t feel her body, couldn’t hear, couldn’t see, finally became nothing but a single, none-too-coherent thought: No! But it was no use. The spell was coming undone, the rock was coming down, this time for good. And Kit was under it. No! No, no, NO—
And everything went away.
The next thing Nita felt was the shock of a spell being broken by forces too great for it to handle, as the rock-shelf came crushing down on it, smashing it flat against something both soft and hard. “NO!” Nita screamed again in horror, as the diminishing thunder of the seaquake was briefly augmented by the multiple crashes of the shelf’s shattering. The floor of the canyon was obscured even to sonar by a thick fog of rockdust and stirred-up ooze, pierced all through by flying splinters of stone, but Nita dove into it anyway. “Kit!”
“You sang?” came a sperm whale’s sharp-edged note from down in the rock-fog, sounding tired but pleased.
Speechless with relief and shaking with effort, Nita pulled up her nose and just let herself float in the trembling water, listening to the rumbling of the quake as it faded away and the songs of the other whales round about as they checked on one another. She became aware of the Master-Shark, finning slowly down canyon not too far from her and favoring her as he went with a look that was prolonged and indecipherable. Nita glided hurriedly away from him, looking around her.
The light of the protection spell showed Nita the roiling of the cloud of ooze and dust in the bottom of the canyon, and the two shapes that swam slowly up through it — first Kit, fluking more strongly than Nita would have possible for someone who’d just gone through what they all had, then Areinnye, stroking more weakly, and swimming with a stiffness that made it very plain just how hard Kit must have hit her. Kit rose to hang beside Nita. More slowly, Areinnye came swimming up to face her.
“There seems to be a life between us, HNii’t,” the sperm whale said.
The mixture of surprise and anger in Areinnye’s song made Nita uncomfortable. “Oh, no,” she said, rather weakly. “Kit did it—“
“Oh, dead fish,” Kit said. “You held it for a good ten seconds after we were out from under. You would’ve managed even if I hadn’t helped.”
“I had incentive,” Nita muttered.
Kit looked at her for a moment. “You didn’t drop it until Ed nudged you,” he said. “You might have gone deaf for a little, or maybe you were in spell overload. But either way, this was your cookie. Don’t blame me.”
“Silent Lord,” Areinnye said — still stiffly formal, but with an uncertain note in her voice, “I thank you. I had hardly given you cause for such an act.”
“You gave me plenty of cause,” she said wearily. “You took the Oath, didn’t you? You’re with me. And you’re welcome.” She took a deep breath, feeling the respiratory part of the protection spell briefly surround her blowholes with a bubble of air for her to inhale. “Kit,” she said, “can we get going and get this over with?”
“That is well said,” came Ed’s voice. He was coming upcanyon again, fast. As Nita looked up she saw him arrow overhead, ghastly pale in the wizard-light, with a trail of darkness billowing thick behind him, and something black in his jaws. It struggled; Ed gulped it down. Inside his gill slits and lower body, Nita could see the swallowed thing give a last couple of convulsive heaves. “And we’d best get on with it—“
Thick black sucker-tipped arms whipped up from the disturbed ooze on the bottom, grasping, flailing in the light. “Oh, no,” Nita moaned. Kit plunged past her, the first note of the scraping sperm-whale battlecry rasping down Nita’s skin as he dived for the body to which those arms belonged. Farther down the canyon, almost out of range of the wizard-light, there was a confused boiling-together of arms, long dark bodies, flat platterlike yellow eyes glowing with reflected light and wild-beast hunger — not just a few krakens, but a great pack of them. “To business, Silent Lord,” Ed said, his voice rich with chilly pleasure, as he swept past Nita again on his way downcanyon.
She went to business. These krakens were bigger than the last ones had been; the smallest one Nita saw had a body the size of a stretch limousine, and arms twice that length. True, there were more toothed whales fighting this time — not only Kit, but Fang and Areinnye as well. And teeth weren’t everything — what Aroooon or Tlhlki rammed didn’t move afterward.
The Celebrants also had the advantage of being wizards. Nita was terrified at first when she saw one of the krakens come at poor slow Roots — and poor slow Roots raised her voice in a few squeaky little notes and simply blew the giant squid into a cloud of blood and ink and black rags of flesh. But a wizard’s strength has limits; such spells could only be worked once or twice. And since a spell has to be directed at what you see, not even the most deadly offensive wizardry does a bit of good against the choking tentacles that you don’t notice coming up from behind you. So it was a slow, ugly, bitter battle, that fight in the canyon. Four or five times the Celebrants were assaulted as they made their way down between the dwarfing, twisting walls of stone; four or five times they fought the attackers off, rested briefly, and started out again, knowing that somewhere deeper down, more thick tentacles and hungry eyes waited for them.
“This is your fault!” Areinnye cried angrily at Nita during one or another of the attacks, while Fang and Kit and Ed and Aroooon fought off krakens coming from downcanyon and from above, and S’reee and Tlhlki worked furiously to heal a great sucker welt torn in Areinnye’s side before Ed should notice it and turn on her.
Nita simply turned away, in no mood for it. Her face hurt from ramming krakens, she had bruises from their suckers and a stab from one’s beak, and she was sick of the smell of blood and the galling sepia taste in the water. The problem, and the only reason Nita didn’t answer Areinnye hotly back, was that there might have been some slight truth to the accusation. According to Carl and the manual, the same pollutants that caused cancer in human beings, that had caused the U.S. Fish and Game Service to warn people on the Jersey shore against eating more than one ocean-caught fish a week, were getting concentrated in the squids’ bodies, changing their DNA: changing them. The food the krakens normally ate at the great depths was dying out, also from the pollution. They had to come up into the shallows to survive. The changes were enabling them to do so. And if it was starving, a hungry kraken would find a whale perfectly acceptable as food.
Nita was startled by the sudden sharpness of S’reee’s answering voice. “Areinnye, don’t talk nonsense,” she said after singing the last note of a spell that sealed the sperm whale’s torn flesh. “The krakens are here for the same reason the quake was — because the Lone Power wants them here. We’re supposed to use up our air fighting them.”
Tlhlki looked soberly at S’reee. “That brings up the question, Ree. Can we complete the Song?”
S’reee swung her tail in a shrug, her eyes on Areinnye’s healing wound. “I thought such a thing might happen,” she said, “after we were attacked the other night. So I brought extra air, more than the group felt it needed. Even so — it’ll be close.”
“We’re a long way down the canyon,” Nita said. “Practically down to the plain. If they’re all down there, waiting for us — if these attacks have just been to wear us down—“
“I don’t think so,” Tlhlki said, glancing over at Nita. “Once out into the plain, we’ll be practically under the shadow of the Sea’s Tooth, close to the ancient site of the Song. And once our circle is set up, they couldn’t get in unless we let them.”
